Open-source News

Written in Erlang language, Apache CouchDB is a free, reliable NoSQL database engine that natively supports data in JSON format. This makes it more scalable and easy to model your data as opposed to...

Most KDE users are probably happy with the current state of the Plasma desktop and the state of the KDE applications. There's certainly less bugs in recent releases, KWin and the overall desktop is in better standing (though still improvements to be made such as showcased by the likes of KWin low-latency) with reliable Wayland support, and most would probably agree that the work out of this open-source project matured rather well in recent years with their focus on enhancing usability and other areas...

First of all, Merry Christmas for those of you celebrating today or Happy Holidays regardless...

This Business Card Runs Linux And Costs Less Than $3  Techworm

While the GNU Hurd microkernel is still woefully behind in hardware support and hasn't even seen a new release in three years, at least a lot of the other GNU projects experienced a great decade -- especially with the likes of the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Octave, GRUB, and other components critical to modern Linux systems...

The Open-Source NVIDIA/Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver At The End Of 2019 - Poor But A Lot Of Hope  Phoronix

While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics stack has made some remarkable improvements this year not only from AMD but also the likes of Valve, unfortunately not as much can be said about the state of the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver. The Nouveau Linux graphics driver remains much slower than the proprietary driver, the hardware with the best support is several generations old, and due to the lack of signed firmware images there still isn't yet any open-source 3D for the Turing GPUs that have been shipping for months. But there may be hope in 2020.

Western Digital Has Been Developing A New Linux File-System: Zonefs  Phoronix

Western Digital has been contributing a lot more to the Linux kernel in recent years from RISC-V architecture bits to storage enhancements. The most recent code they have been working on in recent weeks is a brand new Linux file-system...

Lazarus leverages Dacls Trojan to infect Windows and Linux systems  2-spyware.com

How to Play Games on Your Chromebook  PCMag.com

Since March of this year I began benchmarking various open-source video encoders every other day in our lab. Here is a look at how Intel's SVT encoders and other popular options saw their performance evolve over the course of the year...

In going through the AMDGPU kernel driver changes currently queuing ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle, "virtual DCN" support is coming in working on SR-IOV display support...

Virtual DCN / SR-IOV Display Support Being Worked On For AMDGPU In Linux 5.6  Phoronix

Open source is ready to get to work, and in 2019, Opensource.com had many great articles about how organizations have adopted open source software or open methods to drive their business. As open source matures, we've seen open source not just replace proprietary software, but create entirely new business models.

Check out this list of five outstanding articles from Opensource.com in 2019 about running a business with open source.

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Are you looking to challenge your children (or even yourself) to learn new things about open source technologies? Whether you're in elementary school, high school, or college, or even a parent or teacher, Opensource.com has some great reading about open source technologies suitable for the younger generation. Here are our top 12 articles from 2019 on open source for students (and those who love them).

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Software development is a discipline rife with trade-offs. For every choice, there is an equally defensible but opposite choice. Make a method private? You're encouraging copy-paste. Make a method public? You're committing prematurely to an interface.

Software developers make hard choices every minute. While all the principles in the Zen of Python cover trade-offs to some extent, the following principles take the hardest, coldest look at some trade-offs.

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If you're reading this in 2019, it's almost Christmas (as celebrated according to the Western Christian calendar), and, like all children and IT professionals, it's time to write your letter to Santa/St. Nick/Father Christmas. Don't forget: those who have been good get nice presents and those who haven't get coal. Coal is not a clean-burning fuel, and with climate change well and truly upon us,1 you don't want to be going for the latter option.

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FreeBSD Along With The Other BSDs Had A Pretty Good Run This Decade  Phoronix

While not attracting as much interest as Linux in the cloud, AI, and other growing markets, the BSDs have seen their share of adoption in many of these areas too as well as the likes of powering some of today's video game consoles. FreeBSD is also well known for powering much of the networking infrastructure of Netflix and other large enterprises. The BSDs advanced a lot from hardware support to new security features and other capabilities this decade setting them on a good trajectory as we get into the 2020s...